The best propaganda efforts of highly paid Internet scrubbers aside, most who would try to remove plain facts already online find themselves subject to the “Streisand effect.”

That’s what happened to the singer and actress Barbara Streisand in 2003 when she tried to get aerial photos of her cliffside Point Dume mansion removed from various websites by suing for “invasion of privacy.” There was nothing untoward about the pictures — no one sunbathing poolside in the buff. Just another massive mansion owned by a Hollywood star. But the fact that Streisand tried so hard to take the photos down dramatically increased public interest in them. What was she trying to hide? millions wondered. Far more people saw her pad, and continue to see it, than if she had done nothing.

Over a decade later, supposedly smart Californians continue to delude themselves into thinking that when they have an online image problem, there is something to be “done” about it to make it go away.

That’s what UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi thought about the rabid online criticism that came her way, and the way of her school, after a video of campus police pepper-spraying completely passive student protesters went viral on the Internet in November 2011.

Disturbed at the thought of even more people finding the disturbing footage rather than being truly disturbed about what had happened on her campus on her watch, Katehi spent at least $175,000 to hire an “online image consultant,” Nevins & Associates, which bamboozled the formerly well-respected engineering Ph.D. and her staff into believing it could provide “eradication of references to the pepper spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the Chancellor,” according to documents obtained by the Sacramento Bee under the California Public Records Act.

Yes, this is the same Chancellor Katehi we harshly criticized last month for making hundreds of thousands of dollars by moonlighting on the board of directors of a textbook firm that rips off UC students by pricing textbooks as if they were Gutenberg Bibles.

We said then that these highly paid UC chancellors — whose work plates should be quite full with the job of running a better campus for their students — should be forbidden from serving on for-profit boards.

With this latest revelation of outrageous expenditure of university Communications Department funds “to create and execute an online branding campaign designed to clean up the negative attention the University of California, Davis, and Chancellor Katehi have received,” it’s quite clear that Katehi has no business being the head of a college campus and should resign immediately or be removed from office.

In the first place, doubling the budget for the Communications Department, as Katehi did, in order to churn out happy talk about her during a troubling time at UC Davis shows a concern for image over reality.

But how on earth did Katehi — a technocrat in her previous academic life, not a comp lit professor — get deluded into believing such damaging information could be “scrubbed”? Go ahead, Google “UC Davis pepper spray.” You’ll find more than 300,000 results in about 0.49 seconds.

California needs university administrators with not only better judgment about spending public monies, but better smarts about how the world really works, if the UC is to stay great for our state.

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